Hi, I've just started playing and is having a good time playing the game, especially using judicious use of longbows missiles to blow up a Sung Fortress. I was wondering if I can use more than 1 weapon at the same time, that isn't a launcher and another weapon. On the armour pieces, there are "repair level". What does this mean? Is that the maximum level the station needs in order to repair the armour? I am not sure since I found a repair device early and never had problems repairing armour at stations. Is there a way to find out weapon projectile speed and weapon ranges?

Normally you can fire only one primary weapon and a launcher at the same time.
If you want to shoot more weapons at once you can use linked-fire weapons. These fire along with your primary weapon. However, linked-fire weapons only exist in some mods and the Corporate Command expansion.

The repair level is the minimum level a station needs to be able to repair the armor segment. If it's the same as the armor's tech level (which is just called level) it won't be shown. Higher repair levels make the armor more expensive to repair at a station. If you're on a station that repairs up to level 8 armor, you can repair armor with repair level 8 even if its tech level is higher. Repair devices have a maximum repair level; the patcher arm does up to level 10 and the patch spider up to level 12.

You can try to work out the maximum range of a weapon if you have it installed and if you have a Targeting Program installed on your ship. Select a target, note its distance in the lower-left corner and try to shoot the target.
Also if you look in the game's source code you can see most weapons' projectile speed and the lifetime of the projectile.

Thanks for your answers, but I am interested in vanilla for now. I was using some sort of installed ROM (maybe it was targeting, but i think it was enhanced visual perhaps?) to figure out distance and shooting at a station to figure out ranges and writing down the ranges, but it is strange for such important game mechanics to be hidden. How would I look at the source code?

I installed a patcher spider and it got damaged, and I cannot seem to find a way to repair it. Back to patcher arm I go. Right now, I used some sort of red glowing crystal and entered a system with lots of gates and ended up about 6 gates ahead of my system and is currently in a system chock full of powerful ships and enemies I have never seen before. Looking at the map, it is a good thing I didn't choose Heretics End gate to enter.

Anything that's externally-mounted can easily be damaged if you get hit when your shields are down. The linked-fire weapons in Corporate Command are all externally-mounted, for example, so if you want to keep your extra offense, you have to be very careful about your shield strength.

Repair levels are mostly used to make armor more or less expensive to repair. If the repair level's higher than the armor level, then you have to pay more; conversely, if it's lower (like with the titanium barricades) then repairing is cheap.

Derakon wrote:Repair levels are mostly used to make armor more or less expensive to repair. If the repair level's higher than the armor level, then you have to pay more; conversely, if it's lower (like with the titanium barricades) then repairing is cheap.

Not only that, different stations have different limits on just how advanced an armor they can repair. If you have Level 5 armor that’s Repair Level 6, you won’t be able to get it repaired at stations that only handle up to Level 5 armor. Conversely, if you have Level 8 armor that’s Repair Level 6, a station that can only handle up to Level 6 armor will be able to repair it.

Derakon wrote:Repair levels are mostly used to make armor more or less expensive to repair. If the repair level's higher than the armor level, then you have to pay more; conversely, if it's lower (like with the titanium barricades) then repairing is cheap.

Not only that, different stations have different limits on just how advanced an armor they can repair. If you have Level 5 armor that’s Repair Level 6, you won’t be able to get it repaired at stations that only handle up to Level 5 armor. Conversely, if you have Level 8 armor that’s Repair Level 6, a station that can only handle up to Level 6 armor will be able to repair it.

This is true, but my experience has generally been that in practice, you don't run into repair level restrictions until the late game, and most late game armors don't have modified repair levels (neutronium armor notwithstanding).

Thanks for your answers, but I am interested in vanilla for now. I was using some sort of installed ROM (maybe it was targeting, but i think it was enhanced visual perhaps?) to figure out distance and shooting at a station to figure out ranges and writing down the ranges, but it is strange for such important game mechanics to be hidden. How would I look at the source code?

missileSpeed= The speed of the projectile, in % of light-speed. If this attribute is not specified, then the projectile travels at light-speed. This is expressed as a dice range.
lifetime= The number of ticks that the projectile will live for. This is expressed as a dice range. Projectiles with fragments will automatically detonate at the end of their lifetime unless they are destroyed by something else.

Lifetime is measured in ticks; there are 30 ticks to a real-time second. In the game world, it's 30 ticks to a minute.

I used some sort of red glowing crystal and entered a system with lots of gates

You found Elysium by using a gem of despair. There are other ways of getting there and it can be used as a safe place to store loot or as a shortcut to other systems, as you found out. won't spoil to much, the other way involves installing a device and using it on stargates.

Thank you Ferdinand, for answering the questions to which I have actually asked. I had assumed that the patcher spider could be repaired since if you died, or self destructed, you reappeared with it repaired. Another question: what is the use of Optical knowledge array and Abbasid Thanogram? They give next to no money when sold for such a seemingly rare item. Is it to only donate away to the Sister of Dominas?

Thank you Ferdinand, for answering the questions to which I have actually asked. I had assumed that the patcher spider could be repaired since if you died, or self destructed, you reappeared with it repaired. Another question: what is the use of Optical knowledge array and Abbasid Thanogram? They give next to no money when sold for such a seemingly rare item. Is it to only donate away to the Sister of Dominas?

They're decent donation items, yeah. There's plenty of odd items that are basically just trade goods of some kind, though some have super-obscure niche uses that are arguably spoilers.

Thank you Ferdinand, for answering the questions to which I have actually asked. I had assumed that the patcher spider could be repaired since if you died, or self destructed, you reappeared with it repaired. Another question: what is the use of Optical knowledge array and Abbasid Thanogram? They give next to no money when sold for such a seemingly rare item. Is it to only donate away to the Sister of Dominas?

They can be sold for a fair amount of money, and that's a much better use than donating them unless you really need Domina powers in the first third of the game. Right now, slave coffins will get you to the highest Domina rank without any other donations and can't safely be sold anyways, except through a trick that may have been removed.

They're considerably more useful as donation items in EP, as the CDM donation system can't be gamed as easily.

Please, go ahead and spoiler away. This game seem full of unintuitive elements.

50 credits is obscenely low for a rare item. In any case I have sold it off to a Teraton Nest for 100 rin. After some experimentation with the Terton Fabricator Chamber, I converted a longarm device into a Transpace Jumdrive. After installing it, and using the item, it appears to teleport me to a random spot, not to the jumpgate network.

I only found 2 slave camp and one of them were blown up and the slaves seemed not to want to give me any slave coffins. I brought a slave coffin from a Black market station, they were automatically "freed" when I entered a commonwealth station. I have no idea what EP and CDM is. Can you not use acronyms that aren't in the game please? I am a new player afterall.

Please, go ahead and spoiler away. This game seem full of unintuitive elements.

50 credits is obscenely low for a rare item. In any case I have sold it off to a Teraton Nest for 100 rin. After some experimentation with the Terton Fabricator Chamber, I converted a longarm device into a Transpace Jumdrive. After installing it, and using the item, it appears to teleport me to a random spot, not to the jumpgate network.

I only found 2 slave camp and one of them were blown up and the slaves seemed not to want to give me any slave coffins. I brought a slave coffin from a Black market station, they were automatically "freed" when I entered a commonwealth station. I have no idea what EP and CDM is. Can you not use acronyms that aren't in the game please? I am a new player afterall.

In order:

1. Yeah, item value is a bit arbitrary. It's partly down to them not having much use...but data storage you'd think would be more common.
2. The trans-space jumpdrive has two functions. By activating it normally, it teleports you forwards a few hundred LS. It's good for short-cutting across large systems, and escaping combat in a hurry. Using it while on top of a stargate activates the secondary function: gating you to Elysium (and thus the wider stargate network).
3. Slaves are annoying to get. They're freed automatically on CW stations and thus are annoying to keep. If you 'donate' them to the Sisters of Domina, you get more (and better) god-powers for the invoke menu. You can do the same with Death Cubes and Abbasid Thanograms. Otherwise...they're basically useless. You can sell slaves to the Black market, but doing so can cause an instant game-over the next time you dock at a CW station.
4. EP = Eternity Port, the paid expansion/campaign. 'CDM' refers to a faction within this adventure (the name is annoying and is almost always given ingame as an acronym, but it's fairly rarely mentioned outside of the Eternity Port adventure), and also the invoke powers you get during that adventure (which replace the Domina powers in Stars of the Pilgrim [abbreviation: SOTP]). CDM powers are unlocked using technical items (ROMS, data cubes, death cubes and quantum CPUS) and plot milestones (unlike in SOTP, where they aren't gated at all but are harder to unlock). The acronyms do get a bit....hectic...around here. We probably need a glossary some time.

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The main spoilered use of trade goods I was thinking of is that the autodoc and some other high-level medical goods can save your life if you get a bad outcome at the Teraton research stations. The autodoc's the only one that is guaranteed to do this; the others are a gamble. So if you want some free trade goods, go submit to the Teraton medical monster.

Generally what I do with the Sung is to wait on attacking their slave camps until I've identified the closest Domina station, then do a raid on the slave camp and take the slaves back to Domina. If you're having trouble with the slaves' container "stations" getting blown up, you can either try to use a very high-precision weapon like a particle lancer or laser to take out the turrets, or you can dive directly on top of the central station and blow it up, while ignoring the turrets. You can rescue the slaves as soon as the central station is destroyed, even if turrets are still active, and the turrets won't blow up too many containers if you're quick and don't fly in circles around the camp.

Thanks about how to use the jumpdrive. It's nice being able to cut out playing time. In my case, when I was fighting the Sung, I didn't have any particle weapons. I was still using lasers and kinetics till I entered the Outer Realm, and the Sung blew up their own slave camps. Btw, does anybody know what the militia HQ at ST. Katherine do? They have never given me any missions at all.